China’s economy plummeted 6.8% in the first three months of the year compared with a year earlier, the country’s first such drop since Beijing began reporting quarterly gross domestic product in 1992, reported the Wall Street Journal.
The sharp contraction in the world’s second-largest economy, reported Friday, offers a foreshadowing of the pain expected in the US and around the world as the coronavirus pandemic shuts borders, halts business activity and cripples global supply chains.
China’s 6.8% year-over-year pullback follows a 6% gain in the last three months of 2019 but is better than the 8.3% decline predicted by the median forecast of 15 economists polled by The Wall Street Journal.
Compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, China’s GDP contracted by 9.8%.